Samsung along with Toshiba were the two main suppliers of 1.8-inch hard-disk drives used in netbooks. However, Samsung has now reportedly discontinued the development of 1.8-inch HDDs to focus on the faster-growing Solid State Drive (SSD) segment instead. Hitachi, Fujitsu, Seagate and Western Digital no longer list 1.8-inch HDDs on their websites.

If true, this is likely to lead to a shortage of 1.8” drives, as only Toshiba is left supplying these drives. The shortage is likely to lead to price increases, which may affect Q3 2009 shipments of netbooks and ultrathin notebooks. The smaller 1.8-inch drives are often used in some netbooks over the 2.5-inch drives commonly found in laptops. The height of a 1.8” drive is just 5mm, compared to 7.0 – 9.5mm in 2.5” drives. Earlier this week, Samsung said that it was looking to develop new SATA Mini PCI-E SSDs for netbooks in capacities of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB of storage.